About the Study

Aim of the Study

This study investigates how the language we use to describe our dreams and daydreams (i.e., mind-wandering) relates to our emotional health, specifically alexithymia and emotion regulation. All data are collected online using questionnaires, as well as mind-wandering and dream diaries.

Description of the Study Procedure

The study is carried out online and completely anonymously. To enroll, you must first familiarize yourself with the study, indicate your agreement to participate in the study (at the beginning of Well-Being Questionnaire I), and retrieve your personal participant ID from this page.

Next, you will complete Well-being Questionnaire I which includes questions about well-being, sleep quality, and dream experiences. This questionnaire takes about 20-30 minutes to complete.

After this, you will carry out two tasks over a 2-week period (14 days):

The mind-wandering task is completed in the evenings and takes about 15 minutes per day. The aim is to observe the thoughts, feelings, images and scenarios that arise in your mind when you are not engaged in any specific activity. You will report your observations using an online form available here. More detailed instructions can be found here.
The dream log is the second daily task. The aim is to report whether you remember any dreams from the night, and if so, to describe the contents, events, or experiences that appeared in them. You will record your dreams using an online form available here. More detailed instructions can be found here.

After the end of the two-week period, you will be asked to complete Well-being Questionnaire II. This is a shorter version of the well-being questionnaire that you filled out before starting the mind-wandering and dream diaries.

Benefits and Harms of Participating in the Study

There are no direct risks or benefits associated with participating in the study.
However, this study will contribute to a better scientific understanding of how our language use relates to our well-being.
You will also be able to actively observe and reflect on your daily spontaneous experiences by keeping dream and mind-wandering journals.

How the Research Data Will be Used

The responses from the well-being questionnaires and the linguistic content of mind-wandering and dream reports will be compared.
No personal data will be collected besides gender, age, and race.
You will be given a randomly assigned participant ID that you will use when answering the questionnaires and writing down the reports. It is not possible to re-retrieve this ID or to connect it with your identity (e.g., we will not collect the IP address of your device), and even the researchers of the study will not be able to know whose ID it is. This ID is only used to match the various reports and answers given by the same participant when analyzing the data. If you provide any names, places, or other information in your dream and/or mind-wandering reports that may potentially be used to identify you or other individuals, this information will be removed from the reports during the data analysis procedure. This ensures that the stored dream and mind-wandering reports will not contain any personal or sensitive data.
All collected data is confidential. The data will be stored in the Department of Psychology and Speech-Language Pathology at the University of Turku (Finland), who are responsible for the processing of the data collected in the framework of this study (e.g., ensuring that personal data is processed in accordance with legal requirements). A data protection statement has been prepared for the study, which participants can review here.
The results of the study will be published in a summarized manner in student theses, peer- reviewed scientific articles, and presented at scientific conferences. According to the principles and practices of open science, the data will be made freely available to other researchers via an online database (e.g., Open Science Forum, osf.io). To protect anonymity, only the ratings of the dream and mind-wandering reports will be published, not the actual narrative reports themselves.

Data Protection

General information about how the University of Turku uses personal data can be found here: https://utuguides.fi/researchdata/dataprotection

Please read our Privacy Notice for information about how your data is used in the specific context of this study.

Your Rights as a Participant

Participation in this study is completely voluntary. You have the right to stop your participation at any point of the study without providing any reasons for doing so or without any negative consequences. Data that you have provided up to that point can still be used in the study.

If you want all your reports and questionnaire answers removed from the study, please email the research team as soon as possible and we will do our best to comply with your request. For this you need to provide the researchers with your participant ID.

Please be aware, however, that once the dataset has been published or made open (e.g., available to other researchers) we may no longer have the ability to identify and remove information from a particular participant.

You have the right to obtain more information about the study and to ask questions from the researchers at any point of the study. Please contact the researchers via email (see contact details below).

Researchers’ Contact Information

The study is led by Pilleriin Sikka, Ph.D. (Department of Psychology, University of Turku and Stanford University) (pilleriin.sikka@utu.fi).

The data are collected by doctoral researchers Nanna Strid, M.Sc. (nanna.strid@utu.fi) and Enyu Lin, M.Sc. (enyu.e.lin@utu.fi).

The research team also includes senior researcher Professor Antti Revonsuo, Ph.D. and university teacher Jarno Tuominen, Ph.D.

Collaborators include Professor James J. Gross, and researcher David A. Preece, Ph.D. from Curtin University, Australia.